Rage
by PinkWhirlWind
Summary: Ken races his motorcycle on a rain wet mountain road


Rage By Nix Winter  
  
Disclaimers: As long as it's Ken, Aya, and Youji, I don't own them, ne.  
It was just such a small thing, just an ended conversation. Ken threw one leg over his bike, hands gripping the throttle as his soul could rip through the rubber and steel with icy rage. He should have known better! There was no way Aya could consider him so much as a friend. He was a fool to dream of kisses, of understanding, of mutual protection. Murderous demons don't deserve love or friendship and even if he got it, he'd just screw it up, spoil it like every fucking thing he touched!  
  
The rage clung to his back, claws dug, ripping at his heart. Brown eyes watched the cabin, watched for any sign of red hair, of response. Nothing. The man probably hadn't moved from where he sat at the table. Ken revved the motorcycle. Nothing mattered, he tried to tell himself, but the echoes of past hurts wailed like lost souls in the hell of his being.  
  
This rage had been there before there had been a Siberian. It had powered his friendship with Kaze from the reckless games they'd played until the bloody death of his friend. Ugly, lonely, weak, unwanted, it was dangerous to your friends, nasty puss oozing anger. What right did he have to think he could reach to Aya friendship or love, to want to touch those beautiful lips, to see kindness reflected in those beyond beautiful eyes?  
  
It was love, he knew, lifting his foot from the ground and throwing up gravel as he let the bike's power jerk and carry him forward. Love, it was some impossible belief in the value of another, unfulfillable desire to see that belief in his own value reflected back at him. Greedy, desperately greedy, and vile. Rage overwhelmed the pain, burned out all the vulnerability. He wasn't a man with a glass heart, bruised soul. He was a man on a 1200cc pocket rocket on rain slicked mountain roads, a streak of blue metal and brown leather, sienna hair, and hands that felt like claws as he leaned into the first curve from the cabin's dirt road.  
  
Behind him, Aya stood on the cabin's porch, wearing nothing but dark blue silk pajamas and the new rain darkening his hair. He knew where Ken was going. He just knew.  
  
Ken leaned over the engine, knees in, shifted lower, and took another curve. Wind blasted rain across his face, as if nature were crying for him. The yellow lines, broken or double, danced together in a taunt to his aloneness.  
  
"You worthless fucking brat!" A man's voice screamed in his memory, an inner demon that was more Ken than Siberian. "I don't know who your mother screwed to get you! But it wasn't me!"  
  
The next curve was posted with a fifteen mph limit. Ken took it at seventy- five, leaning the bike over, fighting the pull of momentum and rage between his legs to keep the wheel on his side of double yellow. Water from the road soaked his pants, his tee-shirt, and he shot straight out of the curve into a short straight away. He shifted back up, hit ninety-five by the time the straight away turned into a small hill.  
  
Aya. The wheels of the brand new katana left the road, and for a moment he felt just like when Aya smiled, when Aya talked, and the demons were quiet. Ken lifted up, knees still bent, body off the seat, the heat of the engine vaporizing rain and rising to hit him in the chest, and he knew. The wheels would hit the road again, slicker than before, full of fucking demons, but for this moment, he was off the ground.  
  
The jolt of landing hit him, reverberated up through his knees, thighs, clenched in his gut and he held tight, kept his balance, kept his heart on Aya's smile. Hydroplaning, he stayed upright by sheer will, sheer manic refusal to accept anything less. When wheels gripped road again, he wrapped himself around the heat of the engine, poured on the throttle and flew. Aya didn't really give a shit. It was all in his head, all his own fucking neurotic daydream. "I ought to have just smothered you, you little cock sucker," that same male voice snarled. Ken screamed out loud, his body vibrating with the hum of rpm of the katana. Rage. He'd been nothing but a disease from the moment he'd been born!  
  
The next curve went the other direction and he leaned into it, accelerating as he went, kicked up rain painting grit down his bare throat, into his hair. Over the yellow lines this time, he pulled out of the curve just as a tiny little car screamed it's horn at him. He was already pulling up out of the lean-in though, and flashed the little brunette with glasses a smile as he blasted past her.  
  
It had been too close though and Siberian didn't appreciate the risk. With Siberian's rising a darker rage rose, thick as boiling candy, bubbles of heat bursting the surface so slow like molten cherry lollipop, boiling in the pot of his being, sweet when it's cooled, lava when it's not. Siberian liked speed as well, cool and elegant, faster than a sane person would take the curves, slower than an hysterical sane person. Siberian didn't really care, if Aya liked them or not. Aya's love was only important to Ken who was vulnerable and human. Rage and power were all Siberian cared about. The final rage, maybe, because Siberian also cared about Ken and cared about when the pain was too much to tolerate.  
  
However many curves there were coming down the mountain, they all fed into the long straight away that went back towards the city. There was time, before he got where he was going.  
  
Aya slipped on his jeans, boots, a leather jacket over his blue silk pajama top. He hadn't meant, hadn't meant it however Ken had taken it. Ken didn't understand him. No one did. It wasn't possible. He thought about just letting their friendship end there, just let it fade away, quietly. If he disappeared, Ken would get over it. And so, he'd stood there in the rain, listening to the sound of that foolish pocket rocket fight the rain. Ken would get over him. There wasn't all that much to get over really, just numb nothing.  
  
Except, deep within him, so slight he could hardly hear it, and yet so vivid and steel strong that he could not ignore it and keep his soul. Standing there, still in his pajamas, he'd wondered if he wanted his soul, if he wanted anything other than just release. Only a few minutes later, he was on Youji's dirt bike, unused for months, and hoping that it would start. Since Aya's accident, he hadn't wanted anything for himself, not felt this want of his own. Revenge was a want of it's own, so beyond demon and well onto being a demi-god that used Ran as it saw fit. That left no room for wanting even so much as this lunch over that one.  
  
It felt unnatural to know he wanted Ken, to understand that this want, if unmeet would collapse his soul. After fasting, one should start with little wants, that pair of pants over this, but maybe it took something big to reboot the soul.  
  
Youji's motorcycle revved too fast, kicking the front wheel off the pavement of the garage. There was a path down the side of the mountain, of the road and much shorter. Aya dragged one boot in the gravel as he spun the bike set it off down the shorter steeper path, lit only with moonlight and resentfully awaking soul.  
  
For Ken, the rage slowly cooled along the straightaway. He didn't want it to, didn't want Siberian to relax and slip away. Rage was so much more comfortable than the feelings underneath. The feelings underneath made him feel like he was going under, fading away. He held to the hope of reaching Aya's shrine.  
  
Of to the right, down another door dirt road, under the cover of majestic and tranquil redwoods, he slipped passed the bounds of reason and into Ran's private sanctuary. Anger shredded, becoming thin as wet rice paper, as he neared the only thing that mattered to the only one he'd let close, really close. He'd hid his soul in Ran, and ran hid his soul here.  
  
It was lack of focus that took the big motorcycle over. Shaking arms failed to hold the front wheel and his running shoe skidded in the mud. Before he knew it, he and the bike skidded towards the small clearing side ways, his forward foot on the ground, digging up muddy ground. "Failure! Idiot! You don't deserve to breath!" A voice from his memory screamed at him, now female and the bike laid over on him. The engine scaled his leg, cold mud sucked into his ear, hot tears scalded his face. It would be better for Aya to never love him. He wasn't good enough, and with the last of his rage, he shoved the dying Katana off of his leg.  
  
Self-hate is just another face of rage, just another way to protect from that which is underneath. In the mud, cold rainy clumping dirt between his fingers, under his knees, soaking into his pants and cooling the cooling burn on his inner thigh, he crawled forward, toward the little private shrine for Ran's sister.  
  
She was the last person Ran had let in, last person he'd cared for. Saint Aya, he thought as he crawled, maybe she'd have some power to fix how broken he was. The shrine itself was jsut a little cement poured Japanese temple with a burned out candle in it. Some ivy and some flowers, and Ken went boneless in front of it, sinking into the mud, as even the self hate left him, left him laying in the mud, wishing he could at least cry, cry out his life force because even anger had abandoned him. It wasn't Ran's fault that he was broken, worthless. It wasn't anyone's fault, the things of the past, and he wished, that admitting that, screaming that would make it okay, get him past this pain somehow.  
  
Aya smelled the burned engine oil, flesh, spilled gasoline, before he found the katana laying in the mud. One foot cutting into the same mud, he made it around the bigger bike and on down the path. It was only another eighth of a mile to the little shrine that Ken had helped him build one day the summer before.  
  
What he saw there now made him break, the back wheel of the bike swinging around as he stood there, rain running down his ear tails, down his throat. This was the man he wanted? That some ancient part of his soul longed for? Friendship? Love? Those words didn't have any meaning to the deep part of him that wanted Ken. The more articulate part of himself refused, absolutely refused to take responsibility for this brown haired man wallowing in the mud. The intensity and disaster of emotions was not his problem. It wasn't.  
  
And yet, standing there in the rain, Ran realized that this part of his soul that needed Ken would rather be there in the mud with him than be without him. Not at all agreeing with the logic of his soul, Ran shut off his bike, leaned it against a tree and walked forward. About the only sound competing with the rain was the sound of mud sucking up under his boots as he walked.  
  
Ken turned, rose up a little and got on his knees, hands resting on ruined pants. Ran was surprised to find no tears in Ken's red eyes, a frustrated desert numbness instead. It was beyond Ran to understand. Even before tragedy had taken apart his life, his emotions had been discrete, polite, organized. Defying what was, the understanding he'd had of life, Aya reached for Ken's face, wiped mud away, without a word.  
  
The first tears slipped free, from the outside of his eyes, as if they couldn't really be tears, after all, ran down dirty skin to soak into Aya's fingers. Not an offering, existing only for themselves, more tears followed becoming a sadness so profound that Ken thought he could sink into the mud, abandon his humanity and become some wood gnome.  
  
Aya's other hand caressed Ken's cheek, cleaning away mud, reaching maybe for those tears and then they flowed, rushing out, soundless tears from brown eyes, years of hidden sorrow, headed off with anger and nursing his pride spilled down his face. He felt Aya's hands in his hair, combing, petting, accepting.  
  
He thought he'd cry forever, on his knees in front of Ran, his crimes and ruinous parental demons having no hold on him, no escape into anger or rage, only the purity of his sorrow and the undefined loyalty of his friend. And then there weren't tears, just a light, lacy not pain feeling. He felt Aya's movement then, as his friend knelt in the mud with him, shared space with him, no matter where it was. "Aya?"  
  
"I want you in my life. I don't know anything more than that, so don't ask me to. I just don't want you to leave me." Aya's arms opened, and Ken collapsed forward, filthy face against the body warmed blue silk pajamas. Aya's leather jacket and arms closed around him, holding him. He wasn't home. There wasn't any home anymore, no rules to make it clean and neat, but Aya's heart beat under his chest and they were both alive. The sun was rising, slipping gold into the forest, and it was enough. It was more than enough. 


End file.
